Ranting and Raving in Dublin and London ~ by Zoe Dattner [17.06.2011]

My first empty Irish Guinness, which I drank in the oldest pub in Dublin (1198) while reading an ebook and feeling rather pleased with myself.

I’ve been ranting and raving about the vibrancy and vitality of the Australian independent publishing sector for years now. It’s part of my job, but it’s also a genuine passion, running a small press as I do, but also participating in the activities of my fellow small press compatriots. To some degree though, my enthusiasm is part of a boot-polishing, troops-rallying call to arms, because I believe fervently in the abilities of the human race to create cultural value and share the discoveries that we make about life, and I want more of it. In all the ranting and raving however, I recently discovered that I was taking what we have here in Australia somewhat for granted. Despite working for an organization that represents almost 100 small publishers, I had somehow assumed that we were still operating within a cultural backwater.

A couple of weeks ago I travelled to the Dublin Writers’ Festival to speak at a one-day seminar they were holding on independent publishing. Sophy Williams, the CEO of Black Inc, was also there, as was Steve Grimwade, director of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. What became quickly apparent on the day was that a session of this kind, programmed as part of a writers’ festival, or programmed at all for that matter, was unprecedented. Here in Australia it seems as though we have an industry talk or presentation of some kind on publishing every other week. Scrap that – every week. The organisers felt a daylong discussion such as this was highly called for, as Dublin has a very small local publishing scene, despite literature and its historical significance being evident everywhere you go. No meander down any of its streets is made without a sighting of something literary: a location from Finnegan’s Wake pointed out via a blue plaque inset in a wall; a small relief of Oscar Wilde in the side of a bridge; the lines of a Yeats poem incorporated into the design of a brochure for something seemingly unrelated. It’s a wonderful space to inhabit if you’re passionate about literature. But if you’re passionate about publishing, then you need to travel to London (and even that mighty melting pot appears to be lacking).

During the seminar on independent publishing, we heard from a number of people who work in various aspects of publishing. Three visitors from London included an editor from 4th Estate, a literary agent from Rogers, Coleridge and White, and founder-director of the small press Serpent’s Tail, who first published Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin. Mark Richards, from 4th Estate, recently spent three months in Australia completing an Unwin Fellowship on fiction writing, and made the surprising point that in England there are almost no literary journals, compared with the significant proliferation of them in Australia. Next to Granta, there is very little journal publishing going on, aside from those short-lived initiatives that come from university courses and writing groups. (I’m sure there are some longer-running journals aside from Granta, but the point is that I can easily list up to 15 journals and literary magazines off the top of my head that have been running in Australia for at least 5 years, and some as long as 50 or 60 years.)

The Stag’s Head in Dublin – location of much gesticulating on my part

In Dublin itself, the whole idea behind holding the seminar in the first place, was to start a conversation that will hopefully lead to initiatives and discussions that will one day see Ireland develop a truly local publishing industry. In many respects I think that Ireland and Australia share a tyranny of distance in common. For Australia – we’re miles away from everyone else, and miles away from ourselves, as well. For Ireland, they have felt their close proximity to London loom heavily over them – the distance for them is too short – and for the people in publishing that I spoke to, they were desperate to establish some cultural independence, particularly with regards to publishing. Representing Ireland in this whole discussion was a small publishing house operating from Dublin since 1985, Lilliput Press; a reasonably longstanding literary journal which first went to press in 1997 but is largely funding-dependent and on the brink of fatigue, the Stinging Fly; and a recently launched literary magazine called Moth Magazine, small, but beautifully produced in colour on a rich, thick stock. I told them all the story of SPUNC and what it is that we are trying to achieve here in Australia – not just in terms of the networking and consolidating of the sector (which is part of SPUNC’s function) but also in terms of the future for small publishers. The opportunities presented to us by digital publishing, and the evolution that we’re all a part of. Believe it or not, we’re actually getting pretty organised here in Oz, and our attitudes towards digital publishing and the future of book retailing appear to be travelling at a slightly increased rate of knots to that of Ireland and Britain (after 8 days between Dublin and London, I feel qualified to make these kinds of generalisations). Sophy from Black Inc and I were quite amused to read in the Irish Times one morning we were there, a small article about digital publishing, which suggested that ebooks were some kind of persistent annoyance that refused to go away. On the other hand, in London, Kindles are advertised everywhere: on trains, at stations, billboards all over the place. Although, strangely, I saw very few people actually using one.

I believe that we are moving at a pace here that allows innovation and creativity to flourish unthreatened. For small presses, we are neither beholden to the creaking machinations of great multi-national publishing organizations, nor are we forced to risk entire wages or sales teams on the learning curve involved with migrating from analogue to digital. We’re curious, adaptable and almost everything we do is the result of some kind of experiment, embarked upon with the best of intentions. Why, I was asked repeatedly, does Australia have such a diverse, prolific and outspoken publishing industry? How, with its considerably smaller population than other developed countries, does publishing sustain itself? I made suggestions as to its pioneering spirit – another generalisation. I theorised on the notion that our history as a settled country is relatively short and that we are able to make our mark without the weighty gaze of a deep and loaded cultural heritage. I ordered another Guinness and proffered more hypotheses, gesticulating more wildly with every sip.

But what I was thinking, while all these conversations were going on, was this: I need to let everyone at home know that what we are doing is more valuable, more valued, than it has ever been before. That even as we struggle to understand why some books go under the radar while others are heralded over and over again like the judges who make these calls only read 3 books a year, and while we strive to reconcile our true feelings about the future of publishing, unable to resist the temptation of a prophesy or two, what we are doing while all this is going on is rather special and unique. We are getting on with it. Australia can be a slow and sloppy, inert sort of a place in many respects, particularly when it comes to big, important issues. But I was proud and joyful to discover that when it comes to writing books and reading them, we’re getting on with it.

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